Spring Street Museum

The Spring Street Museum is in a building put up around 1866, which the museum calls arguably Shreveport's oldest. It housed Tally's and Asher's banks, became the Banking House of E. and B. Jacobs in 1877, and in 1886 Edward Jacobs received the city's first banking act charter and renamed it First National Bank, a name it kept until 1903. The original vault remains.

The building also held the Shreveport branch of the Freedman's Savings and Trust Company, which opened in late 1870 in what was then the Tally Building. Congress had created the Freedman's banks after the war, and Shreveport got one because of its large Freedman population; only New Orleans had more people of color per square mile in Louisiana. Samuel Peters, a local African American cashier, ran it. The Caddo Gazette reported about $3,000 in assets from 1,152 deposits in the first three weeks. On February 20, 1871, Sarah Jones, a 25-year-old basketwoman, opened an account, and the register notes she "draws only for herself." A 2025 exhibit curated by LSUS shows copies of the registers.

Upstairs, a Victorian parlor recreates the late 1870s and 1880s, and rotating exhibits on the first floor draw on a collection that includes plantation records, clothing from 1835, maps and photographs. LSUS history students work on the museum's local digs. It is at 525 Spring Street, free, with donations welcome.